2007 — 2011 |
Ricotti, Massimo |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Toward Petascale Simulations of Early Cosmic Evolution @ University of Maryland College Park
AST-0708960/0707505/0708309 Norman/Ostriker/Ricotti
This is a three-award collaborative project, led by Dr Norman, to harness the power of future petascale supercomputers for self-consistent simulations of early structure formation in cosmologically representative volumes. Astronomers' expectation of what will be observed at high redshifts (above 7) by future major facilities is largely based on theoretical and numerical models of the early growth of cosmic structure in a standard Lambda-CDM cosmological framework. The new simulations will span local and global scales using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technology developed specifically for petascale computers. This enables simulations with ten billion particles, a spatial dynamic range of a hundred thousand, and complex baryonic physics including radiative and chemical feedback. As theories are at present poorly constrained by observations, an equally important effort will be a rigorous attempt at uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. The study will thus address forefront questions in cosmology using the most complete physical models running on the most powerful computers, analyzed using best practices. The result will be comprehensive models of early cosmic evolution along with a rigorous assessment of their predictive value.
This work will substantially advance the state-of-the-art in numerical multi-physics cosmological simulations, which can be expected to continue previous successful impacts of code availability, both within and outside of the astrophysics community. The new petascale methodologies will also be publicized well outside the usual astronomy circles, and the enhanced version of the Enzo community code will be released to the public. In addition, both the numerical results and the synthetic observations will be published to the international research community using mechanisms provided by the National Virtual Observatory.
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2011 — 2017 |
Ricotti, Massimo Kalnay, Eugenia (co-PI) [⬀] Balachandran, Balakumar [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Cdi-Type Ii: Unravelling the Complexity of Extreme Waves: a Computational Quest @ University of Maryland College Park
Extreme waves occur as an emergent phenomenon in many natural systems. These unusually large concentrations of energy coalesce from smaller adjacent perturbations. This energy focusing effect, which has been observed in ocean waves, fiber optic systems, and microwave systems, is not well understood and has not been investigated through massively parallel computations. With this in mind, the overall goal of this multi-disciplinary team of researchers is to pioneer an integrated approach to computationally model extreme waves through Eulerian and Lagrangian formulations, use CUDA based large-scale computations as a means to obtain an enhanced understanding of energy focusing associated with the natural and complex phenomenon of extreme waves, and exploit the insights and knowledge gained for forecasting such conditions for the first time. The proposed four-year effort is to be carried out by a team comprised of researchers from mechanical engineering, applied mathematics and scientific computation, atmospheric and ocean sciences, and astrophysics. This team will pursue a novel integrated approach to create a computational platform, advance GPU-based simulations, and use computational thinking to derive fundamental insights into the complexity of extreme wave conditions. This understanding can help in facilitating energy focusing and taking advantage of it for energy harnessing. Specific outcomes are expected to include different computational models tailored for studies of full field extreme waves, including Lagrangian based N-particle computational models and grid based Navier-Stokes formulations. Instability tests based on the breeding method, which have been developed for atmospheric and ocean modeling studies, will be used for the first time to identify characteristics of instability growth in ocean wave interactions and forecast them.
The proposed work has multiple global economic, security, and scientific applications and shares many of the values of the Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation program. A large number of broader impacts are conceivable given the wide ranging and multi-disciplinary influences of wave energy concentration. The potential to create sub-specialties and entirely new fields of energy transport optimization demonstrate the important science these emergent phenomena can reveal. The identification of precursors and modeling of extreme wave events can afford wide ranging benefits to many fronts including commercial shipping, naval missions, offshore energy harnessing, fiber optic communications, and galaxy formation and other astrophysical phenomena. Apart from integration of research findings into the undergraduate and graduate course offerings across departments, a new cross-disciplinary undergraduate elective on computational dynamics will be created and offered to enable discovery based learning. Along with a post-doctoral scholar, three graduate students will directly get a unique opportunity to work on convergence research and develop computational thinking through a robust cross-disciplinary education. Local high-school students are also expected to benefit through simulation based research practicum to be pursued at the University of Maryland. Art-in-science displays on solitons and other wave phenomena will be used to stimulate and nurture the interests of K-12 students who visit campus for different events including the annually held Maryland Day on campus.
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2013 — 2017 |
Drake, James (co-PI) [⬀] Drake, James (co-PI) [⬀] Miller, Michael (co-PI) [⬀] Reynolds, Christopher [⬀] Reynolds, Christopher [⬀] Ricotti, Massimo |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research : the Multi-Scale Physics of Massive Black Hole Formation, Fueling and Feedback @ University of Maryland College Park
This project will create a Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics Network with major nodes at the University of Maryland, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Yale University to advance the theory of formation, fueling, and feedback of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The project proposes to accomplish this task by linking computational codes simulating large-scale SMBH phenomena (i.e. cosmological gravitational collapse and AGN jets) to the small-scale phenomena (i.e. SMBH formation and feedback on galactic structure). For the "formation stage", the project intends to answer the question of how the first black hole (BH) seeds formed within the early universe by numerically simulating the coupling of large-scale baryonic structures and dark-matter halos to small-scale collapse of primordial gas disks into massive BH seeds. For the "fueling stage" the project aims to explore the growth of the BH seed into a SMBH from galaxy-scale accretion flows to SMBH mergers. Finally, for the "feedback stage" the goal is to explore the mechanisms by which the SMBHs at the centers of active galactic nuclei (AGN) couple to the inter-cluster plasma on cosmological scales. The network will contribute to scientific workforce development through the involvement of undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs. The project will communicate results to the public through development of a 3-D visualization taking the viewer on a journey to witness the birth and growth of a SMBH and its influence on the cosmological environment.
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